Tesco hails Branston as best carbon reduction supplier

Branston, one of the UK's biggest potato buyers, has won a Tesco supplier award for its low carbon technology innovations.

Branston has completed a number of projects which have helped it to reduce resource use such as its purpose-built prepared foods factory, designed to maximise efficiency and reduce waste. The factory recycles warm air from chillers and utilises waste pallets and broken potato boxes in a biomass boiler.

Branston has also invested £2M in an anaerobic digestion plant - all food waste from its factory and outgrade potatoes from the fresh potato factory are sent to the facility, which has enabled it to reduce electricity use by 40% at the Lincoln site.

The company has also installed water recycling technology, which is fully integrated with the AD plant. This enables the water used for washing potatoes to be recycled, and then extracted during the AD process.

Branston has also reduced mains water consumption by 60% at the Lincoln site and has now invested a further £1m a similar water recycling facility at another one of its sites in the South West.

On receiving the award, Branston's projects director Vidyanath Gururajan said: "Over the past few years we've investigated a wide range of green initiatives and it's only after careful analysis that we've invested in the best of this technology - innovations that really work for us.

"All our major capital expenditure projects have sustainability built into the brief. At Branston we see low carbon as low cost - the money we have spent on taking this new low carbon approach is ensuring our long term sustainability as a local employer and market leader."